More evidence for 99¢ iTunes TV rentals, Apple TV makeover

The rumors continue to build over both an Apple TV makeover and 99¢ TV show …

Ninety-nine cent TV show rentals through iTunes are getting closer to reality, at least according to multiple sources speaking to Bloomberg. Three separate "people familiar with the plan" claim that Apple is in advanced talks with News Corp. to offer 48-hour rentals of popular shows from Fox, backing up previous rumors about Apple's push towards 99¢ shows.

According to the unnamed sources, other networks, such as CBS and Disney, are also busy working out deals of their own with Apple. The shows would apparently work in the same way as current iTunes purchases—they would be playable on iPhones, iPods, iPads, and likely the Apple TV, not to mention your standard computer.

Currently, TV downloads from iTunes cost an average of $1.99 per show—just high enough to annoy many customers who are used to getting TV for free, but low enough that people pay it. A 99¢ TV rental would obviously be a little closer to free and, if the shows remain commercial-free like the rest of iTunes, would be an upgrade from watching them on the boob tube or Hulu.

The networks have been rumored to be hesitant about Apple's push, but it sounds like they're now more open to the possibility. After all, such a deal could help them boost revenue, especially when TV viewers seem to be canceling their cable subscriptions left and right.

The negotiations may also be tied to a major Apple TV update that is supposedly in the pipeline. Bloomberg's sources corroborated the many previous rumors about an updated Apple TV, including the introduction of a $99 version and a serious focus on streaming (Bloomberg claims the device will have a smaller hard drive than current models, though, while previous rumors say there won't be a hard drive at all). The new Apple TV may even get a new moniker, iTV, although already-existing trademarks make that more unlikely.

One thing for sure is that the buzz about the Apple TV and cheaper TV shows are beginning to reach fever pitch. It wouldn't be a surprise to hear an announcement about Apple's plans soon, as there's an expected September Apple event just around the corner.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

61 Reader Comments

An earlier rumor put the rental period at 24 hours, and now it appears to be 48. What is it with these short viewing windows? It's not as if it costs more to give someone a week to view a streaming rental film.

if you calculate based on advertising revenue for a show - even the top shows rarely make a 1$ per watching household, and average shows make less than 50 cents per watching household. Many shows are probably close to 10 cents per household.

For DVD sales of TV shows it is usually less than a dollar per episode, and the individual can resell the DVDs.

Have you forgotten Hulu+ already? Just how many of these shows will remain on the free version of Hulu instead of migrating to the pay/subscription site? The push is clearly towards increased monetization of the content across all mediums.

Being ad free has a value, at least to me. At least 12 minutes per hour for broadcast TV, and somewhat less for Hulu.

Or I can just record it on my DVR and have it for as long as I want for free.

you forget about the cable bill.

Never mind that usually "As long as I want" basically means "However long it takes me to watch it."

If I want something for posterity I'll buy the box-set. I'm not too big on paying for permanent access to digital ephemera unless there is some kind of service bundled in. I pretty much assume the shelf-life of any digital media is about 5 years (the life of my computer.) Anything beyond that is a happy bonus. This disinclines me from paying full price, but it also keeps me from being disappointed when I lose my stuff.

Well if the average person watches 4 hours of TV per day then that $4 * 30 = $120. I expect the average cable bill is half that so to make this doable they will need to make shows $0.49 per hour or a quarter for a 1/2 hour AND it's the purchase price, not a rental.

I don't see how that is not doable, I would think the internet distribution costs would even be less than cutting in the cable/sat companies. The thinking at the media cartels seems to be there is a endless money stream out there and the more they control, resell the more there is to make. Well real people have a thing called a monthly budget. $60 bucks is about all I have to spend on home entertainment, cable or ''iTV" either way they won't get both or more. Offer more choices and make it convenient and people will buy in. Make it expensive and a bother and people will just get it for free. Not rocket science.

I pretty much assume the shelf-life of any digital media is about 5 years (the life of my computer.) Anything beyond that is a happy bonus. This disinclines me from paying full price, but it also keeps me from being disappointed when I lose my stuff.

You should start an online backup service!

"All your media guaranteed backed-up, until we get tired of storing it."

I pretty much assume the shelf-life of any digital media is about 5 years (the life of my computer.) Anything beyond that is a happy bonus. This disinclines me from paying full price, but it also keeps me from being disappointed when I lose my stuff.

You should start an online backup service!

"All your media guaranteed backed-up, until we get tired of storing it."

It's not that. It's just most of the stuff I get I don't really care about all that much, and I've had data go corrupted on me before. I've had hard drives fail, I've had flash drives fail, and pretty much every optical disc I ever burned with data has gotten corrupted over 5-8 years. I've also had weird issues with transferring files that misfiles stuff and messes with data somehow. For the most part things go fine, but there is some level of risk associated with holding a lot of data over a long period of time. Eventually, when I change computers I'll even forget what all I had on there.Yes there is some risk in having physical media as well, but scratching a disc because I'm a klutz somehow doesn't feel as bad as just randomly losing stuff due to forces of nature.

Sadly when we invent storage we usually gun for density over longevity and stability. I'm sure eventually the day will come where we hit diminishing returns on increased volume, decide to just pick one standard format for storing our data, and pick an archival system that's both easy to read/write, easy to index, and will last indefinitely. When that happens I'll probably take digital media more seriously. But that's a long way away. For now, I just think of them as extended, indefinite rentals and the best way to back up your data perpetually is to share it on a P2P service, rename it "XXX PORN BOOBIES SEX XXX," and let it circle around in the cloud forever.

Meh. I would be glad to pay for a Hulu+ type service where I pay monthly to stream whatever I want on demand if the selection was good. Even better, do it per show, like The Daily Show for a month is $1, some cheesy rerun is 25 cents, big name prime time shows for $2, etc. Get free streaming of whatever is new that day in order to discover new shows, then buy for a month.

This way if you only watch three shows ever, you only pay a few bucks a month. If I like ten shows I pay $10-20 per month. It's on demand so bandwidth is cheaper than a constantly streaming service like cable. Freebies run "live" in order to entice you into subscribing for the month. See a new show that looks cool? Spend a buck or two and have access for the month.

The point is that there are all kinds of interesting ways you could set this up if the content providers would get on board. I guess the down side is that they won't be interested in working with all sorts of different services (Hulu, Apple, and anyone else who decides to get into this kind of thing) with different price plans, etc.

Meh. I would be glad to pay for a Hulu+ type service where I pay monthly to stream whatever I want on demand if the selection was good. Even better, do it per show, like The Daily Show for a month is $1, some cheesy rerun is 25 cents, big name prime time shows for $2, etc. Get free streaming of whatever is new that day in order to discover new shows, then buy for a month.

This way if you only watch three shows ever, you only pay a few bucks a month. If I like ten shows I pay $10-20 per month. It's on demand so bandwidth is cheaper than a constantly streaming service like cable. Freebies run "live" in order to entice you into subscribing for the month. See a new show that looks cool? Spend a buck or two and have access for the month.

The point is that there are all kinds of interesting ways you could set this up if the content providers would get on board. I guess the down side is that they won't be interested in working with all sorts of different services (Hulu, Apple, and anyone else who decides to get into this kind of thing) with different price plans, etc.

Apple has gone on the record as being adamantly against tiered pricing in iTunes. The rationale is that they want people to think "I want to buy that," hop on iTunes, and buy it without worrying about how much it costs. If prices get tiered you have to stop and check the price and wonder whether you can get it cheaper elsewhere, whether you'd rather get something else, or whatever. If it's 99 cents a song for every song then you know going in that you want something, it's 99 cents and you don't need to worry about it. Presumably the same rationale applies to TV. Flat price per ep to download, flat price per season to download, flat price for streaming, and so on. But not likely to do anything more complicated than that. Granted, the TV industry is a little different from the music industry, but I think the general motivating/marketing philosophy will still hold.

Sounds like a good price to me. Single copies of things are generally more expensive than bulk packages, so comparing to monthly cable TV is apples to oranges. Of course you would not do this for 4 hours of TV per day, 30 days per month. Duh. That's not Apple's target customer. But it would be easy to justify for one TV show that you don't otherwise get, or miss w/o DVR, etc.

People, the price is measured in cents. I'm sure it'll be easy and convenient. Plays on multiple devices. I bet it's a winner.

I'm fine with this. Hulu works great for free and BT works great for everything that I can't get on Hulu. The nice thing about internet TV is that there's always a free and easy option that everyone can continue to use until the industry finds a good way to make it worth our money. 99c rentals aren't the way but at least they're starting to try.

They can have less of my money than they want or they can have none of it. All I want is a fair, convenient, and reasonably priced service. It's all up to them now.

I'm sure eventually the day will come where we hit diminishing returns on increased volume, decide to just pick one standard format for storing our data, and pick an archival system that's both easy to read/write, easy to index, and will last indefinitely. When that happens I'll probably take digital media more seriously.

The promise of Apple adopting ZFS was supposed to solve all that, but things simply didn't work out. Which continues to be a drag.

I've managed to keep all my files intact going all the way back to the early 80's (including every single email I've ever sent or received), but that was through assiduous triple-backups and integrity checks every step of the way. I've since bought an OWC RAID-5 storage device on a Black Friday special that holds everything, plus a second unit, bought empty as a discounted refurb, as a backup. It's not the end-all of storage, but has bought me some time until the next plateau settles in.

Keeping all your files is feasible, with a bit of money and dedication, but it's ultimately a matter of priority.

Quote:

the best way to back up your data perpetually is to share it on a P2P service, rename it "XXX PORN BOOBIES SEX XXX," and let it circle around in the cloud forever.

In the past the joke was to keep sending yourself email attachments of important files, relying on mail server latency to act as the backup, but I like your plan better. Just make sure everything is encrypted beforehand. (And throw in a few booby GIFs to satisfy the seeders.)

As someone happily living since more than 10 years without TV this seems to almost make sense. If the content is right. Which it probably isn't.

Still, TV has long become essentially worthless ad-padding. The daily 4 hours are rarely spent really watching the stuff, it's just sort of running in the background more often than not. Actually paying a (rather small) amount of money for watching something you'll probably never watch again anyway doesn't need to be a bad thing. Paying monthly for a subscription to watch as much advertizing as you can stomach isn't necessarily getting you more. For $60 you can buy two shows a day and if you also need background noise and flicker there are other (free) options. And of course you also can rent and watch the stuff on your iPad and your iPhone and your computer.

I think this could be a clever move, at least in the long run. It won't kill cable TV but for quite a few people it may be an option. I can't see anything wrong with the option to rent and watch an ad-free show on the iPad or the iPhone whenever you feel like it. Especially if it doesn't cost you anything if you don't.

Well if the average person watches 4 hours of TV per day then that $4 * 30 = $120. I expect the average cable bill is half that so to make this doable they will need to make shows $0.49 per hour or a quarter for a 1/2 hour AND it's the purchase price, not a rental.

Four freaking hours? Every day?

Crap, I wish I had that kind of time!

That having been said, before we dropped satellite, the TV was definitely "on" four or more hours each day. These days it's rare, though. Even two hours a day of actually watched television is rare ("two hours" of course meaning about 84 minutes, which is the length of two hour-long shows, ads excluded).

The main thing is, if you pay for individual shows, you don't end up buying background noise. You can get that from just about anywhere if you want it. When you pay for shows, you buy what you watch.

For our family, we spent $8 last month on television. That's at $2/show. The rest was on Hulu and other ad-supported sites (which still give us a full hour-long broadcast in about 45 minutes). At $1/show for the Hulu'd shows, we'd still end up at around $25/month. Two years ago, we were spending $85 for the same shows plus background noise.

Why would I pay 99 cents to see a 20 minute TV program that aired for free? I could watch a recorded copy from a DVR, the various on-demand services or from torrents/newsgroups.

I bet the Apple crowd will lap it up anyway what with their spare cash and all.

The Apple crowd usually has a notion of convenience and is willing to pay for that. Watching a program when you have a free slot and nothing better to do instead of watching whatever comes in at that moment is convenient and not having to record it or hunting down a torrent also. You could also ask why people are willing to pay actually outrageous prices for a bottle of mineral water instead of just lapping some tap water for free which basically is the same stuff.

OK, I'm neither watching TV nor drinking mineral water but I don't think all who do that are idiots. Not realizing that convenience is worth money to most people is somewhat silly.

It's still too much. I'm paying ~60CAD for 25 channels and dozens of shows. The same on this plan would get me The Daily Show and Colbert and that's about it.

Depends on your usage pattern. I don't watch a whole lot of TV, so even splurging for the high-def version, I spend an average of $15ish monthly (given the nature of TV, a lot more some months, zero others), which beats the heck out of $60, even if they're Canadian dollars.

Verizon keeps wanting me to get FIOS TV, but adding it into my current package adds at least $30/month and that's before you add the DVR capability that lets me watch when I want like I do now. Oh, and I don't have to fast forward through commercials, either.

If my wife or I watched more TV, it'd certainly be a different story, but in this house, iTunes/AppleTV soundly thrashes cable, DSS, or FIOS. One could argue that this is exactly why it has to change: If their marketing hit me, they missed the market that's gonna drag in the big bucks-- like, say, the family with kids that adds kid shows to the list of stuff that gets watched. Or the family with the stay-at-home Mom who has the TV on soap operas all day. Or my mom, who has ESPN or Speed TV on 24/7/365...

Is it too expensive? For a lot of folks, sure. And I certainly wouldn't complain if they cut prices-- but it's still a lot cheaper than the alternatives for me.

Until the premium channels jump on board I'm not interested, except for sports I never watch network TV. I just don't see HBO and Showtime being eager to give up those premium cable/sat revenues any time soon though.

Until the premium channels jump on board I'm not interested, except for sports I never watch network TV. I just don't see HBO and Showtime being eager to give up those premium cable/sat revenues any time soon though.

Apple has gone on the record as being adamantly against tiered pricing in iTunes. The rationale is that they want people to think "I want to buy that," hop on iTunes, and buy it without worrying about how much it costs. If prices get tiered you have to stop and check the price and wonder whether you can get it cheaper elsewhere, whether you'd rather get something else, or whatever. If it's 99 cents a song for every.

Uni-pricing doesn't prevent that. It might make the math a little easier but probably not.

If you aren't married to iTunes, then ANY time you might consider a media purchase there's always the possibilty that someone else will have it for 1/4th the price.

Until the premium channels jump on board I'm not interested, except for sports I never watch network TV. I just don't see HBO and Showtime being eager to give up those premium cable/sat revenues any time soon though.

I can already buy HBO and Showtime TV episodes through the iTMS in Australia for only a little more than the USD0.99 being quoted in the story. Why won't you also be able to rent them?

I can get a $99 bluray player and pay $8.99 per month for neflix 1 dvd and unlimited streaming. If I watch more than 9 shows per month, I come out ahead. Plus I can use the same box to play a cd, dvd or bluray. Why would anyone buy apple tv? Jobs will have to get exclusive rights to popular programming to make this one fly.

It's a tough market. I'm not sure Apple has fully realized how brain dead Americans are on TV. 99 cents per episode for the average American watching 4-5 hours of TV per day still works out to about $150 per month. Add a few other people in the house and you would certainly have hundreds of dollars of 99 episodes being purchased per month. It's just not viable for most people. I suppose it could work in conjunction with a more limited subscription plan (say just the big 3 networks) and a big back catalog of much cheaper rentals. I dunno though. When you're going to be watching 40-60 hours of TV per week among several people in a household cable/satellite/piracy are still the best options.

At $99 with 720p content, I can see getting one of these boxes, but it's certainly not going to replace cable and it'd probably see pretty limited use from me. If they had a "all you can watch" subscription at say $25-$50 per month, with a good selection of ad-free content, I'd be all over it. If HBO buys into it I would definitely use it for that, but it sounds like they want to go it alone with their HBO Go service...which requires you have digital cable with an HBO subscription anyway. Which is asinine.